NASA’s next flagship space telescope is getting ready to launch. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will probe some of the cosmos’ most vexing mysteries, is set to take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 30 August.
This new observatory gets its name from NASA’s first chief of astronomy, who helped plan the Hubble Space Telescope and built the agency’s space astronomy programme. It and the previous major telescope to be launched, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), are designed to work together to investigate the universe in infrared-light wavelengths.
But while JWST was intended to probe deep into distant space with a relatively small field of view, Roman will take a broader, shallower view, capturing an area of the sky equivalent to the full moon in each observation.
Advertisement
Using its Wide Field Instrument, Roman will take images with the same resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope, but over an area of sky 100 times larger, making it 1000 times faster at gathering data than Hubble. This broad view is intended to allow Roman to map the distribution of dark matter across the universe and measure the effects of dark energy.
“The goal is not necessarily for Roman to take a picture of dark matter or dark energy, but to measure their effects with far greater precision,” said at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, one of the science leads for the mission, in a . “That could help us understand what the universe is made of, how it developed and what may happen to it in the distant future.”
These broad surveys will also enable it to spot a huge variety of cosmic objects. JWST can then follow up on the most interesting of them to get deeper, more detailed data, or Hubble can observe them in a wider variety of wavelengths of light.
Over the course of its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to observe about 12 per cent of the sky, unveiling the universe going back to just 2 billion years after the big bang. Space telescopes tend to have their missions extended – Hubble, for example, was only expected to last about 15 years and has now been operating for more than 36 years. This means Roman may well end up observing a much wider swathe of sky.
The observatory’s other scientific instrument is its coronagraph, designed to directly image planets orbiting other stars. By blocking the light from the stars themselves, it will allow the reflections of that light off any planets to shine through.
This will enable it to see planets that are 100 million times fainter than stars, far more than any existing space-based coronagraph can accomplish. Spotting all those planets will set the stage for NASA’s next proposed flagship space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
If the launch goes smoothly, Roman should reach its final position at L2 – a gravitationally stable point about 1.5 million kilometres further from the sun than Earth – in about a month. It will then undergo another three months or so of instrument testing and calibration before beginning its science phase, so the first scientific observations are expected to begin around the start of 2027.
The science of space exploration and astronomy: US
Take off on a quest through the past, present and future of space exploration across the US. Discover the first pioneering rockets, iconic missions, space stations and the emerging commercial space tourism industry.
